Any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old. That doesn’t imply that the 10-year-old technologies we might draw from are mature or that we understand their implications; rather, just the basic concept is known, or knowable to those who care to look.
Here’s the message to be heeded: Innovation is not about alchemy. In fact, innovation is not about invention. An idea may well start with an invention, but the bulk of the work and creativity is in that idea’s augmentation and refinement. The newer the idea, the coarser the granularity of most analysis, and the more likely people are to say, “oh, that’s just like X” or “that’s been done before,” without any appreciation for how much work and innovation is involved in taking an idea from concept to wide practice.
Those things do not just happen. It is work and success is a process. An enjoyable book on the subject is Scott Berkun‘s Myths of Innovation. Here is a video lecture of him discussing innovation, creative thinking and ideas presented in the book:
We all like stories. Innovation stories that focus on moments of epiphany can give the impression that it is that moment that is important – rather than the perhaps long time of preparation that led to the moment.
In Rate This Article: What’s Wrong with the Culture of Critique, Chris Colin discusses the current environment of generating reviews/recommendations/opinions online of articles, restaurants, movies, etc. – things that we interact with on the Web. Expressing opinions by sharing tweets, reviews, recommendations and engaging in conversations around them is very much a social activity and thus almost necessarily extremely popular.
The aforementioned essay presents an interesting perspective. Two sections particularly stood out for me.
Technoculture critic and former Wired contributor Erik Davis is concerned about the proliferation of reviews, too. “Our culture is afflicted with knowingness,” he says. “We exalt in being able to know as much as possible. And that’s great on many levels. But we’re forgetting the pleasures of not knowing. I’m no Luddite, but we’ve started replacing actual experience with someone else’s already digested knowledge.”
Having more information available is generally preferable to having less. We are in trouble though, if a large amount of information creates, what perhaps amounts to an illusion of knowledge, particularly if that cuts short our own quest for discovery.
Modern search engines as well as large amount of meta information in form of reviews, opinions, etc. provide extremely convenient sources of data and real shortcuts in knowledge acquisition. It is good to learn from other people’s experiences. That however, does not need to be the end. Sometimes, quick answers are more than sufficient, but other times there are real opportunities for deeper inquiry, to “figure it out for oneself.”
There’s an essential freedom in being alone with one’s thoughts, oblivious to and unpolluted by anyone else’s. Diminish that aloneness and we start to doubt our own perspective. Do I really think Blue Bottle coffee is that great? Or Blazing Saddles that funny? Do I really not like that pizza place because it isn’t authentic New York-style? Sure, it’s entirely possible to arrive at one’s own opinion amidst a cacophony of others. But it’s also possible to bend, unknowingly and imperceptibly, toward a position not naturally our own.
Knowledge can both empower and constrain. Both is important, but in this discussion that second aspect may be the more interesting one. Every bit of information that we consume about a topic will inform and build our perspective and opinion of it. We will become biased, perhaps in subtle ways, but often quickly. It is important to consider the artificial, mental boundaries that we will build, based on the information available to us.
Like many good quotes, the following is commonly attributed to Mark Twain.
They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!
This can be interpreted more broadly and I think it comes down to the following. Introspection to determine our own biases in a given situation can be an instructive exercise. Sometimes it is a very good thing to ignore or place a lower emphasis on certain pieces of knowledge. Sometimes, one has to dive in deep and experience discovery not because but in spite of any other information that others provided.
I have been a Netflix subscriber for a few years now. Recently I switched to their streaming-only option. This was not in response to their restructuring their subscription prices. Rather, I found myself really not wanting to deal with those DVDs any longer. It was not that opening envelopes or carrying them to the mailbox had suddenly become a hassle (though there is maybe a little truth to that), more importantly: the queues simply did not work for me and the way I consumed them any longer.
Netflix’s streaming selection is large, but there are lots of titles that they only provide as DVD rentals. Earlier this year, I purchased an Apple TV. Among other things it offers the convenience to rent or purchase a movie and then just start watching it, streamed over the Internet. Even though this accrues a (relatively) small extra expense, getting the movie virtually immediately over Apple TV is much more convenient than waiting for a DVD in the mail.
That part is obvious, here is what is perhaps more interesting.
There’s a beautiful paper by Daniel Read and two coauthors showing the gap between what people want to do in principle and what they want to do right now. They asked subjects to choose several films from a list containing a mix of highbrow titles (e.g., Schindler’s List) and lowbrow titles (e.g., My Cousin Vinny). When asked which film they wanted to watch a few days later, most picked a highbrow one. But when asked which they wanted to watch right now, most went lowbrow. In principle, we want to be the kind of people who watch serious movies, maybe even French ones—just not tonight! And so our queue becomes aspirational, filled with titles that are more ambitious than the ones we really want to watch.
I’m guessing there is more to it than just the pleasure/aspiration tradeoff. However, thinking about this a bit more I realize the following. Both my DVD queue and my Instant Queue contain well over 50 items. Whenever I do decide to watch a video these days, that movie is almost never in either queue though. I simply go with whatever I find most appealing at the time. I would like to think that low-brow entertainment is not generally winning over the high-brow variety, but I also have no evidence to prove that.
At times, it does seem as though my adding a movie to a queue can almost make it less likely for me to actually watch it.
Technological progress and decreasing prices have given rise to an interesting movement. Quantified self or self tracking describes the idea of people collecting and analyzing data about themselves. This is now possible in ways that really was not practical a decade earlier.
I would like to tell you that it’s also for self-knowledge. The self isn’t the only thing, it’s not even most things. The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass. So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better.
I think, people generally like data. The ability to collect and subsequently analyze and view the data, can lead to powerful feedback loops that can help us make better, more informed decisions about how we live.
